Getting It Done

I’m a self-taught web programmer, and I’ve noticed that to a degree all technical books, inevitably, present best-case examples, in which programming is starting from scratch, and the project is fairly simple and well-defined. That’s a reasonable fantasy to use for didactic purposes. After all, it would be distracting for an author, or a reader, […]

An Unexpected Crime Report

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten back to working on my crime tracker. In the meantime, an interesting crime report came to our email boxes: a robbery on an illegal gambling house. The report got my attention for three reasons: 1) Apparently the operators of the illegal gambling house chose to call the police […]

The Algebra Study Group

HOST: Next up on our program, we discuss the findings of the Algebra Study Group, the bipartisan panel convened this year to review the math-class policies of eighth grader Timmy Morgan. We will be joined by several members of the committee and ask what their consensus opinions are and whether they think Timmy will take […]

Crime Report Tracking Tool

I’m happy to announce that my Crime Tracker, v. 0.4, is ready to unveil. You can test it out at http://michaelharrison.ws/projects/cpcr/public/. It’s not meant to be definitive, yet. It’s more of a demonstration of what can be done with Google Maps and Ruby on Rails. I’ve written a detailed account of the steps I took […]

Crime in College Park

We’ve had a little bit of a crime wave here in College Park in the last month. Although things have quieted down recently, for a while it seemed my wife’s email account was getting daily reports of a UMd student getting robbed at gunpoint or jumped. Campus and county police have flooded the area, at […]

Spam Poetry

I’m not the first to point this out, but among the hundreds of pieces of spam that accumulate in my Junk folders, which I occasionally sift for valide messages that got marked as spam incorrectly, a few real gems of drivel, nonsense, or prurience turn up. Such a treasure has shown up in my inbox […]

What I’m Reading: Ruby Month

October is Ruby Month for me. September was kind of Ruby Month too, but the past is past. Read more for descriptions of Dave Thomas’s Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide and Bruce Tate’s Ruby on Rails: Up and Running. I think they’re both fantastic books for intermediate programmers discovering ruby and rails.

The Ruby Pattern Spy, Part II

Getting a Little Organized I’m mostly a self-taught pogrammer, so I tend to cite books as influences. One book that has influenced me a lot is Test-Driven Development By Example, by Kent Beck. Beck is a big proponent of XP, and in this book he walks his readers through the process of writing tests first, […]

Enter the Labyrinth

One of the challenges of our exile from New York City has been our consternation with the street grid (or lack thereof) in our new neighborhood. We’re basically one big cul-de-sac off Route 1. Furthermore, instead of a rational system of straight (and continuous) streets running along cardinal directions, we have something that resembles a […]